But as the unemployed among us will know, dear Petey has brushed off his six pack and launched his own daytime DIY show. Which looks suspiciously like he's ripped that old 60 minute make over programme from Claire Sweeney's jazz hands, and prit-sticked his name and face all over it. Anyway, as usual, I digress.
We have moved to Portsmouth!
The reasons were numerous, the timing less than ideal, and the flat was barely functional.
The old tenants (from hereon referred to as "chavs") had left it in a less than favourable condition.... From Cat pee to Nicotine stains.. they'd left their mark. Quite literally.
The ideal, that i would immediately start baking in this heavenly spacious kitchen that i could actually move in (previous kitchen was actually a kitchen cupboard) was quashed, or was it squashed? (must look in to what that extra S does) when we realised the oven didn't work.
So instead of approaching the situation logically and replacing the oven. We began to rip down the kitchen. My logic and succinctness clearly go hand in hand.
As much as i enjoy knitting, and icing cupcakes, and generally emulating the activities of your average pensioner (see previous blog), i thought: you know what? I'm going to give manual labour a go, how hard can it be?!
Stop laughing and put your eyebrow down.
But only if you own said kitchen.
That, along with stealing loo roll, is not a way to improve inter-flatmate-relations.
It's also good for a time-lapse-film.
Like all good pensioners, I do love a bargain. So, We tried to do as much as the work ourselves as possible. I may use the term "our" quite liberally. I ripped the kitchen out and then left for panto whilst Dan put the new one up. We may quibble that Dan got the rough end here, but after a week of putting units together and 10am disco medleys we were both a little crazy.
Lots of our new furniture is, well, nearly as old as I aspire to be. I found a reclamation yard by Fratton station that sells everything you could want! (Only if everything you could ever want is a Victorian chest of drawers and bookshelf, which thankfully for us was what we wanted!). But seriously from tea chests to tea cups, it's well worth a rummage!
Have a nosey:
There we go, 95% finished! (The remaining 5% is made up of photo frames, hurricane lamps and a set of bedside tables we can agree on, 1st world problems). The satisfaction of finishing lasted about a day. I'm now itching for another project. The most logical thing would be to move and start again.